Main menu

Cathy Young

You are here

Cathy Young received her B.A. in sociology and women’s studies from Harvard and her M.F.A. in dance from the University of Illinois. She is nationally recognized as a master teacher and has taught classes at more than 30 colleges around the country, as well as at the Bates Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival and the International Open Look Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. While she is perhaps best known as a teacher and choreographer of jazz dance, her thirty years of experience in the field of dance have been wide-ranging and diverse. Throughout her career, she has been immersed as a performer and choreographer in the areas of modern and post-modern dance, improvisation and contact improvisation and ballet, which was central to her training and development. Her depth of experience has inspired her to seek the connections between different dance forms and genres and to develop herself as a versatile, open-minded artist.

As a performer, Young has danced with a number of companies, including Zenon Dance Company and Danny Buraczeski’s JAZZ DANCE!.She has also toured extensively throughout the US and Europe, and she has performed in prestigious venues such as the Joyce Theater in New York and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. For the past 20 years, Young has focused on creating her own work, a dynamic mix of styles and dance forms that intermingles jazz, modern, contact improvisation, social dance and gymnastics. She creates choreography for her own company, Cathy Young Dance, and has been commissioned by major companies around the world. Young is the recipient of awards and grants from various arts foundations. She was previously Department Chair and an Associate Professor of Dance at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, and now proudly serves as Director of the Dance Division for The Boston Conservatory.